Five Considerations for Building an Effective Incident Response Framework

A traditional incident response cycle has four steps to remove the attackers' advantage: prevent, detect, investigate and respond. Having a framework in place ahead of an incident will help streamline this cycle. This will allow companies to spend less time learning about the threat and more time overcoming it.

Although news headlines are consistently reporting that cyber threats are evolving into more targeted, sophisticated attacks, it may come as a surprise to some organizations that 75 percent of the security breaches that occur are opportunistic. According to a recent Verizon data breach report, these attacks are not targeted at any specific individual or organization.

For organizations that fall victim to a security breach, there tends to be a large focus on reducing the breach buzz to repair earned reputation and rebuild customer trust. For IT teams within the company, this means the noise and buzz must be reduced by cutting down on the time and resources it takes to repair the network.

Building an effective incident response program is essential for organizations because it enables them to not only contain a single incident, but it also helps to start modeling the techniques of an attack. Incident response stems from an approach that detects and enumerates the steps taken by an attacker to compromise a system. This information is used by the incident response team, which drives future incident response activities.

In this slideshow, AlienVault, provider of Unified Security Management™ solutions and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, offers five considerations for building an effective framework for incident response in order to remediate the threat.